06 September 2015 12:51 AM

We won't save refugees by destroying our own country

THIS IS PETER HITCHENS'S MAIL ON SUNDAY COLUMN

Actually we can’t do what we like with this country. We inherited it from our parents and grandparents and we have a duty to hand it on to our children and grandchildren, preferably improved and certainly undamaged.It is one of the heaviest responsibilities we will ever have. We cannot just give it away to complete strangers on an impulse because it makes us feel good about ourselves. Every one of the posturing notables simpering ‘refugees welcome’ should be asked if he or she will take a refugee family into his or her home for an indefinite period, and pay for their food, medical treatment and education. If so, they mean it. If not, they are merely demanding that others pay and make room so that they can experience a self-righteous glow. No doubt the same people are also sentimental enthusiasts for the ‘living wage’, and ‘social housing’, when in fact open borders are steadily pushing wages down and housing costs up.As William Blake rightly said: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.’Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island, which most people can’t get to. Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion by mountains, sea, deserts or a combination of these things. Ask the Russians or the Poles what it’s like to live without the shield of the sea. There is no positive word for ‘safety’ in Russian. Their word for security is ‘bezopasnost’ – ‘without danger’.Thanks to a thousand years of uninvaded peace, we have developed astonishing levels of trust, safety and freedom. I have visited nearly 60 countries and lived in the USSR, Russia and the USA, and I have never experienced anything as good as what we have. Only in the Anglosphere countries – the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is there anything comparable. I am amazed at how relaxed we are about giving this away.Our advantages depend very much on our shared past, our inherited traditions, habits and memories. Newcomers can learn them, but only if they come in small enough numbers. Mass immigration means we adapt to them, when they should be adapting to us.So now, on the basis of an emotional spasm, dressed up as civilisation and generosity, are we going to say that we abandon this legacy and decline our obligation to pass it on, like the enfeebled, wastrel heirs of an ancient inheritance letting the great house and the estate go to ruin?Having seen more than my share of real corpses, and watched children starving to death in a Somali famine, I am not unmoved by pictures of a dead child on a Turkish beach. But I am not going to pretend to be more upset than anyone else. Nor am I going to suddenly stop thinking, as so many people in the media and politics appear to have done. The child is not dead because advanced countries have immigration laws. The child is dead because criminal traffickers cynically risked the lives of their victims in pursuit of money.I’ll go further. The use of words such as ‘desperate’ is quite wrong in this case. The child’s family were safe in Turkey. Turkey (for all its many faults) is a member of Nato, officially classified as free and democratic. Many British people actually pay good money to go on holiday to the very beach where the child’s body was washed up. It may not be ideal, but the definition of a refugee is that he is fleeing from danger, not fleeing towards a higher standard of living. Goodness knows I have done what I could on this page to oppose the stupid interventions by this country in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which have turned so many innocent people into refugees or corpses. But I can see neither sense nor justice in allowing these things to become a pretext for an unstoppable demographic revolution in which Europe (including, alas, our islands) merges its culture and its economy with North Africa and the Middle East. If we let this happen, Europe would lose almost all the things that make others want to live there. You really think these crowds of tough young men chanting ‘Germany!’ in the heart of Budapest are ‘asylum-seekers’ or ‘refugees’? Refugees don’t confront the police of the countries in which they seek sanctuary. They don’t chant orchestrated slogans or lie across the train tracks. And why, by the way, do they use the English name for Germany when they chant? In Arabic and Turkish, that country is called ‘Almanya’, in Kurdish something similar. The Germans themselves call it ‘Deutschland’. In Hungarian, it’s ‘Nemetorszag’.Did someone hope that British and American TV would be there? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: spontaneous demonstrations take a lot of organising. Refugees don’t demand or choose their refuge. They ask and they hope. When we become refugees one day (as we may well do), we will discover this.As to what those angry, confident and forceful young men actually are, I’ll leave you to work it out, as I am too afraid of the Thought Police to use what I think is the correct word. But it is interesting that this week sees the publication in English of a rather dangerous book, which came out in France just before the Charlie Hebdo murders.Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, prophesies a Muslim-dominated government in France about seven years from now, ushered into power by the French Tory and Labour parties. What they want, says one of the cleverer characters in the book, ‘is for France to disappear – to be integrated into a European federation’. This means they’d much rather do a deal with a Muslim party than with the National Front, France’s Ukip equivalent. If any of this sounds familiar to you, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s amazing how likely and simple the author makes this Islamic revolution sound. Can we stop this transformation of all we have and are? I doubt it. To do so would involve the grim-faced determination of Australia, making it plain in every way that our doors are open only to limited numbers of people, chosen by us, enduring the righteous scorn of the supposedly enlightened. As we lack the survival instinct and the determination necessary, and as so many of our most influential people are set on committing a sentimental national suicide, I suspect we won’t.To those who condemn reasonable calls for national self-defence as bigotry, hatred and intolerance (which they are not), I make only this request: just don’t pretend you’re doing a good and generous thing, when you’re really cowardly and weak.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

C Morrison;

*** "Just how overcrowded, infrastructurally unsustainable and concreted-over do they want everywhere to be?" ***

They don't think about that. All that registers with them is emotion (hence how our politics is now so often about who is the most "passionate" about whichever subject is under discussion - the one with the most passion wins). Reason and reality come a poor second place.

It's like people who mortgage their house to play the lottery. Utterly idiotic, but they don't see it. All they see is NOW, with little or no thought to the future.

Its why out economy is such a mess; business has to focus on competition today, and pour all its savings and as much debt as possible into competing today, because those who do not do so will automatically lose by default.

Its why we have an epidemic of obesity; focusing on the pleasure of eating the food now, rather than the repercussions later on.

Same with booze, promiscuity, drugs, gambling, the environment.....

The human race is literally (yes, literally) descending into madness. Emotion and appetite are given far more weight than reason and reality. People would rather live in a fantasy than face the truth. They are fleeing from reality into a dark age of ignorance, where knowledge and truth are discarded if they prove to be emotionally inconvenient.

Of course sooner or later this will all crash to a halt. Reality cannot actually be avoided forever. If it could, it wouldn't be reality. At some point circumstances will probably start to wake us up to our foolishness, but the longer that takes the more painful the awakening is.

The question is....will we get too far down the slope to crawl back up again?

John Rutherford,
Thank you for your post of 6th. September at 6.39pm.
I see your point, but how do you answer question 2 of my post of 6th. September at 6,18pm? My question was:
2.
If the migrants come here, what will they do? Are there jobs and homes lined up for them?
I have heard tell of people taking migrants into their homes, but how many people will actually do it if the migrants actually come? I wonder. I can imagine thousands and thousands of migrants wandering around the country, living as tramps.
In that case, what we do?
I can see 2 possibilities.
1.
Make people take migrants into their homes, whether people want migrants in their homes or not. But would you do that. John? Whoever would?
2.
Put up camps for them.
The other problem is: ‘what jobs are they going to do?
I fear that we might end up camps full of penniless migrants twiddling their thumbs, only in Britain because they cannot walk across the Atlantic and bitter with a Britain which was not what their hopes and fancies made it.
Things could turn nasty.

The man who wrote the offering below is utterly deluded and living on planet Zog. Syria is a failed state with a third rate education system. Most developing world education systems are characterised by low standards, corruption and fakery in various ways.
Just this week a British academic spent time in a Thai jail for complaining that his research had been ripped off by an academic charged with enforcing copyright!

Britain has a problem with falling standards I agree but is still light years ahead of a place like Syria; this writer really needs to get a grip on reality:

"I understand that about 40% of Syrians are graduates and that many have qualified in technical subjects such as engineering and computer science. I also understand that Germany currently has a demand for those qualified in these key areas. I think the concern must be that Germany will quickly accept those highly qualified and professional migrants and then try to clear out the others by imposing mandatory quotas on other EU states..."

**** What did George Orwell write " we can sleep safe in our beds because rough men are prepared to do violence on our behalf" People should remember that when bemoaning how horrid Britain & America are . ****

Aye, but there's a 1984-type amendment to that, whereby nowadays the only people who can sleep sound are the criminals who rule (including their big-business chums) and have "rough men prepared to do violence" to carry out orders on their behalf, not ours.

Anyone heard of the United World Federalists? A group within the US Establishment in the 1950s, lobbying for World Government ... one of its members was the future President Reagan, and one of its demands was that all countries surrender their nuclear weapons to that global regime -- which would thereafter use them to obliterate any country or region which tried to secede. Another policy of the UWF was that every country should be garrisoned by troops as incompatible as possible, so as to minimise potential empathy with the indigenous population -- and suppress dissent.
Sometimes wonder if the megalomanic UWF really did fade away, or did it morph into what's knocking around at the top of Establishment politics now, there and abroad.

Returning to the sleeping safe in bed point, I see the reflectionless images of Cameron, Obama, Blair, Clinton, Hollande, Merkel and the rest of such corporatist killer-lice, and recall the Steeleye Span song "You Will Burn"......

@ Roy Robinson
But rest assured they will all arrive here one way or t'other .
Today I rode the local Tram through Croydon . Lunar house the Immigration building for all immigrants . The lines outside where at least 2000 strong . At a time when these new lot have not arrived, and Calais is a war zone.
But keep believing Cameron is not Milliband on immigration . But long term, the same result . Never kid yourself they are not all hewn out of the same model .in fact I'm surprised you took that view.

Dear Mr Hitchens,
Given that successive governments have encouraged mass immigration, propagandized for it, dismissed objections to it, attempted to paint objectors as racist and immoral, and have enacted legislation to suppress objection, and, given that mass immigration is set to continue and that the objectors' grounds will become more and more affirmed by their observations of its effects on condtions in housing, employment, health services, education and so on, we must expect that the legislation and guidance designed to force a false face of 'welcome' on objectors is bound to become stronger and more unreasonable as time goes on. With this in mind, Mr Hitchens, would you review and analyse the guidance published by the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland, under the title "Hate Crime Guidance Manual 2010".

This worrying document appears to allow all sorts of 'intelligence' gathering, including the accumulation of opinion and hearsay, on the basis of spurious, subjective claims that a 'suspect' has uttered something or done some act, even a non-criminal act, that can be construed by some other person as motivated by what is called 'hate' towards any of a huge range of other persons. This information, that need be no more than opinion, rumour and perception, can then be shared amongst 'partner agencies' including local councils, the NHS, and so on. How it is to be used by them is not revealed.

Those campaigning for Scottish independence on the basis that they will somehow achieve 'freedom' by it, might take a hard look at this document and ask themselves how conducive to freedom are its provisions.
***PH writes: and people ask me why I recommend emigration. ****

Posted by: David | 08 September 2015 at 01:41 PM:
I have just been watching the tv news , calls for an enquiry into why those 2 chaps have been killed by a drone strike. There family may claim compensation from the Government . 1st , does it matter what method was used to kill them , unmanned aeroplane , manned aeroplane , SAS attack ? I don't think so . 2nd , claim compensation from a Government that admits it took action against 2 British citizens who have been killing people and preaching a variation of death to the west for 2 years at least , I think that makes them traitors does it not ?...........

So you're not one of those foolish "liberals" who complain that Putin had a Ruskie traitor assass!nated in London with Polonium?

And demand he extradites the k!llers (illegal under Russian Law!).

And I take it that since Libya you believe that Assad has every right to take out the command and control centres in London and Washington organising these air-strikes, regardless of whether Cameron or Obama's kids will be "collateral damage" like Gadaffi's grandchildren?!

In fact, since the Balkans, I take it you agree that Assad has the right to take out embassies of countries that he isn't at war with in countries he hasn't any right to go to war in (as well as TV Stations, Old People's Homes, Hospitals......).

And I also presume you agree that Islamic State has the legal right to do all that too!

So part of our foreign aid budget will henceforth be used to fund refugees granted asylum into this country. Is this ‘full-on’ Political triangulation or mere social self-strangulation?....Personally, I’m finding it very difficult to keep up with all this political/media manipulation. Not that these manipulations and machinations are particularly covert or even hard to detect (for those individuals who wish to see), but the speed of change is pretty mind-numbing.

Our last chance is surely the EU referenda - but by the time of the vote, and for any real chance of an EU exit result - I wonder what the (politically manipulated) battle-lines will be?......thankfully I suppose we do have in our favour the most stupid and vapid serving British PM that ever existed!!!

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Philip Foster, you are correct in mentioning the two post-1066 invasions of England; Henry Tudor (along with French supporters) supplanting Richard III at Bosworth (1485) and then the ‘polite state invite’ to William of Orange (1687), but along with a Dutch army standing by just in case James II didn’t take the hint!

Of course, in terms of ‘invasion’ it would be important to also note that along with a foreign Dutch Royal Family, Britain also imported from the Netherland’s its new emerging way of doing business. Although this heralded positives such as 200+ years of productivity growth/increased standards of living (along with bankrolling the expansion of the British Empire), ultimately such change was at the cost of an increasingly interfering banking/financial system - which grew to dominate and then to supplant - ‘real-world’ wealth, replacing it with the unstable edifice (i.e. 10- year cycles of economic bubbles/banking crashes/currency crises) and the type of elitist financial-wealth system we have today…. The global economic system is well past its sell by date - but it is smaller countries such as Iceland who are showing the way for change (not quiet libertarian socialism, but its start).

@ Roy Robinson
If Labour are the losers party. What even can that make the Cons and Libs and to a certain extent UKIP as well.
As far as UKIP is concerned they haven't really had their chance . But they were never what most of their support, thought they were. Just a #2 Thatcherite bunch . And I well remember what thatcher did directly after her swamping speech . Invited thousands of Vietnam boat people in . The transport the same ,but just different refugees.
Me as an avowed racist and ex BNP, can at least take the honest view. From my perspective . And agree some of these Syrian Families should come here , In a direct relation to all those we should deport, for whatever reasonable reason . T E Lawrence liked the Syrians above all other Arab entities . And that's a good enough reason to take a few. But like I said Quid pro quo.
And when the time is right return them . I remember when Tristan Da Chuna and Greneda became volcanically dangerous and we offered shelter . After the danger passed, they all went home.

I have just been watching the tv news , calls for an enquiry into why those 2 chaps have been killed by a drone strike. There family may claim compensation from the Government . 1st , does it matter what method was used to kill them , unmanned aeroplane , manned aeroplane , SAS attack ? I don't think so . 2nd , claim compensation from a Government that admits it took action against 2 British citizens who have been killing people and preaching a variation of death to the west for 2 years at least , I think that makes them traitors does it not ? Let the familes claim , then the Government should countersue using the Joint Enterprise legislation , these 2 individuals are part of IS after all , to pay any compensation to the families of any one , The 2 British aid workers for a start , that those 2 people killed or caused by their deliberate actions to be killed or maimed. I am not a Lawyer but is it beyond a Government & Civil Service full of them to deal with these idiotic clams ?
What did George Orwell write " we can sleep safe in our beds because rough men are prepared to do violence on our behalf" People should remember that when bemoaning how horrid Britain & America are . God help us .

Last month I got this automated email message from the Daily Mail after posting to a website discussion following a news item.....
" Thank you for your reader comment for the article linked below. Unfortunately it has not been published because you have posted more than 10 comments in last 24 hours for this article. "
Never had such a message before -- and now with people here mentioning their messages are not appearing, I'm wondering if the same auto-limitation applies?

William.
I totally agree with you.What worries me is that we are living in a dictatorship that is run by Angela Merkel.Unless we cut free from this dictatorship (and it will be a lot harder than we think) then the United Kingdom will die.Merkel already has a plan to destroy Europe,she said yesterday that Germany will change,she means it and she wants it.
There will be nothing stopping all those people coming to the UK while we remain under German rule.

Integration isn't easy and it doesn't happen overnight. It is a process that takes many generations.

You are right, integration is not easy and I'm more interested in this generation, my children and grandchildren's generation and the fact that those who are being displaced, then come here and actually cause displacement. Thanks to large numbers a different male cultural attitude.
We keep hearing the term "white flight". I hear Diane Abbott tell us that it is because local people become more affluent and move away from areas that were once traditionally local.
When in cases I know of personally the difference in male attitude towards women, is not acceptable and the tensions between too many different cultures of newcomers also causes problems.
I have no truck with the EDL, but it is often those who are in the communities they come from who tried to have a voice about the abuse of young vulnerable girls in places like Rotherham.
There is a case this week. Peter explained in his other Sunday article about how these young are not seen as "worthy".
It is not unreasonable to be very fearful of a complete lack of control of any checks, for criminal, or terrorist threat. To throw away all normal checks and be overwhelmed.
We see attacks on ISIS members, while we have no idea of who we have striding through Europe or slipping in in lorries.
You are right it isn't easy when you see one part of family move away from local areas they were born.....the upheaval that brings.
Never mind it will be Ok in generations to come.....we shall see whose right.

Jack,David,Tanya Bowman and mikebarnes.several of my posts did not make it on here last month,which left me wondering if there was much point in posting my thoughts on here.I want to here every ones comments from the most politically correct person to the most far right neo Nazi if possible the only thing that should be banned is foul language.i still enjoy reading the comments here but refuse to post anymore.

Roy Robinson: There are obviously plenty of different reasons why people take the political positions they do, but I'd argue that in many cases the motivation for supporting the left is often the opposite of what you suggest. It seems to me many gravitate to Labour not because they self-identify as losers but because the cultural and intellectual elite tend to reside on the left. Over the last 50 years or so Labour in Britain, and the Democrats in the US have been the parties of Hollywood celebs, rock stars, trendy comedians, trendy novelists and many super-rich tycoons as well. During Cameron's time in opposition Michael Portillo wrote an article about how embarrassed the Shiny Faced One seemed to be about the tragically uncool brand Conservatism seemed to be in those days. Presumably this is why he rapidly transformed the Tories into an identikit version of Nulabor.

Moreover, contrary to what you argue, I think many Labour supporters were only too happy to forgive Blair just about everything he did precisely because he WAS a winner. The same folk who railed hysterically against Reagan and Thatcher's "war-mongering" found plenty of excuses for the much more war-like policies of Blair, Clinton and Obama. Cameron also tends to get a free pass from such people, because he isn't an old-fashioned uncool Tory (I mean he has Joy Division on his ipod and everything).

By the way I see nothing wrong in principle with people identifying with a "losers party" and voting for them. If "losers" believe they lose because the party in power doesn't represent their interests or holds them back, then it makes sense for them to support a party they believe will represent their interests. That is after all the only way they'll become winners. Whether Labour has ever been such a party is a very different matter.

This morning in the Guardian, the vice-chancellor of Germany is quoted :
*** “I believe we could surely deal with something in the order of half a million for several years,” he told ZDF public television. “I have no doubt about that, maybe more.” Germany expects to receive 800,000 asylum seekers this year, four times the total for 2014. ***
That is, quite simply, beyond irresponsible and heading towards insanity -- worse still, Germany seems to be insisting that all other EU countries should copy it .... though thanks to the EU's "freedom of movement", they'll have no choice anyway.

Strange how politicians and mass-media tend to refer to all the"refugees" as Syrian, despite so many being quite clearly from elsewhere. They must have noticed......

Also interesting that the political-correcter "left" keep asserting that mass immigration is necessary because of reduced birthrates in the countries of Europe.
Just how overcrowded, infrastructurally unsustainable and concreted-over do they want everywhere to be?
Before the present wave of invasion with (as things stand) millions more likely to come, the most frequently used argument for immigration was that the population as a whole is getting older -- conveniently forgetting to mention that immigrants get older too ... therefore, according to the pc/left argument, there would have to be a constant (and increasing) inflow, for ever.
Now they relish having acquired a vast number of "refugees" with which to batter the indigenous populations.
So they'll switch to declaring -- as do the Neocon types with whom they have so much in common, beneath the shallow veneer of 'label' politics -- that mass immigration will induce "economic growth".
But that is only of relevance within the already unhinged economic cultism of monopoly-capitalism ... in fact, the imperative for perpetual growth is itself inflicted by the inherently fraudulent debt-money financial system of such capitalism. Without it, the whole rotten, obsolete system would implode.
So the pc/left are actively seeking to preserve a system to which they *claim* to be opposed. Have they found a cozy niche, in becoming its pet cestodes?
One thing sure -- neither they, nor the big-business interests salivating over the prospect of a potentially unlimited supply of units of economic activity to exploit, nor the present Political Establishment, really care a damn about the indigenous people of Britain. Or anywhere else, come to that.

Re the Engineered Refugee Crisis report referred to by P W Laurie.
Was the policy described designed before the Syrian "Civil" war or unrest started ? or did it come about to manage it , there has been a refugee crisis in that region for years , Armenians , kurds , the Palestinians they have all been displaced by the Ottomans ,the boundaries being redrawn after the first world war , Iraq created ,someones masterpiece , Saddam , civil war in the Lebanon and the Asads to one degree or another.
It does appear that there is a deliberate strategy to get rid of the established governments in Syria , Libya , etc . I cannot see that the Turks would be a pushover for IS like Iraq unless there is support for IS within Turkey , so refugees are safe there .

What about Aidan's point- that we do not have children anymore?
England is finished: but it isn't the fault of mass immigration. There is mass immigration, because we are finished.
The family went before the nation did; the faith was lost before the family was lost.
Modern atheistic England has NO POSITIVE IDEALS. Money, sex and food remain (carnal appetite)- it doesn't really matter who joins in the pursuit.
This is our culture's OFFICIAL LINE!!!!!

Here's a tip for ISIS - it's bonanza time guys ;the ruling elite in Europe have lost the plot and decided that the parable of the Trogen horse no longer applies. If you wish to invade, all that's needed is to join an angry mob and declare yourself a "refugee" . Not only that, but politicians like Yvette Cooper will be ready, willing and waiting to shower you with benefits - it's a win, win situation !

There is in fact no need for a cats whisker to enter the UK - all they need to do is call out the army to manage the situation. In fact, we're already full up - the streets are filled to bursting point and we are probably the most densely populated country in the world.

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.